Taming the beast

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The Beast in the
Nursery by Adam Phillips,
Faber and Faber, pp. 133

The Guardian, February1998

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ADAM PHILLIPS, CHILD PSYCHOANALYSTand essayist, has a talent for titles. That the author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being
Bored should call his latest collection of psychoanalytic meditations
The Beast in the Nursery, seems
fitting. For Freud himself certainly discovered a beast lurking in every
nursery and made it clear that this beast had surprising sexual
propensities. Indeed, in arriving at his theory of infantile sexuality,
Freud assumed that children were full of desires which were, quite
literally, 'beastly'.

His inspiration for this was the
nineteenth-century biological theory which maintained that children
developed by recapitulating earlier phases of animal evolution. Since very
primitive organisms had no penises and used the mouth as their
reproductive organ, sex was supposed originally to be a kind of 'higher
eating'. More complex organisms such as reptiles and birds, practised a
form of cloacal intercourse, described by the biologist Bölsche as 'anus pressed against
anus'. Only with the advent of crocodiles and other saurians did animals
really begin to get down to it and replace these primitive sexual modes
with the penis and vagina.

If nineteenth-century
recapitulation theory was correct, as Freud assumed it to be, it followed
that young children would rapidly evolve through primitive animal forms of
sexuality before arriving at full genital sexuality. In keeping with this
hypothesis Freud postulated that all children developed through an oral
and an anal stage of sexuality before becoming phallic. A failure to
progress normally through these stages might result in sexual 'perversion'. That Freud himself saw sexual perversions as a particular
kind of beastliness is suggested by one of the most revealing of his many ex cathedra pronouncements: 'Among animals,' he wrote, 'one can find, so to speak, in petrified form,
every species of perversion of the [human] sexual organisation.'

Yet, as a more cautious
thinker might have anticipated, nineteenth-century biological speculations
about recapitulation proved not to be correct. Since a large part of the
cathedral of psychoanalysis had actually been built on the shifting sands
of these speculations, it rapidly began to sink into its own foundations.
Freud himself attempted to underpin his creation by stoically claiming
that the twentieth-century biologists were 'all wrong', but the cathedral
has continued to tilt ever since so that its nave must by now be pointing
almost skywards.

For observers of what
must count as one of the greatest intellectual disasters of the twentieth
century, common-sense would seem to indicate that we should abandon
Freud's nineteenth-century folly and start again. But those who have found
solace by worshipping within the cathedral have seen things rather
differently. In a series of increasingly elaborate engineering projects
they have attempted to salvage what has seemed to others
unsalvageable.

Adam Phillips's latest
book, like his earlier ones, belongs to this modern tradition of
psychoanalytic revisionism. For its sheer daring and imaginative boldness
Phillips's contribution is without rival. In it he has set out to restore
Freud's theories about children and children's sexuality to the heart of
psychoanalysis while offering only the most oblique intimation of what
those theories actually are. One of the great advantages of this strategy
is that he is able to turn traditional psychoanalytic doctrines almost on
their head without this ever becoming obvious to his reader (or, one
suspects, to Phillips himself).

One of the distinctive
characteristics of classical psychoanalysis was that it reflected the
profound distrust of childhood which is part of our Judaeo-Christian
inheritance. So much so that, as the Harvard psychologist David McClelland
once observed, 'to hear Anna Freud speak of the criminal tendencies of the
one and two-year-old is to be reminded inevitably of Calvinistic sermons
on infant damnation'. There was a difference however: although the
Freudian (or Kleinian) child was sadistic, sexually perverted and full of
lust and rage, psychoanalysis maintained that all this was only natural.
Children were therefore not to be regarded as sinful, and what Freud
called their 'ruthless egotism' would be curbed in the course of ordinary
development.

In the Beast in the Nursery Adam Phillips
casually peels Freud's positive estimation of childhood as 'natural' away
from the profoundly negative attitude which underlies it. Astonishingly
the founder of psychoanalysis is thus introduced on the first page of the
book as 'a very late Romantic' who 'found the passions and perplexities of
the child exemplary; the child with her consuming interests, her
inexhaustible questions, and her insisting body'. Much of the remainder of
Adam Phillips's book is a kind of sub-Blakean paean to 'the child who
psychoanalysis has mislaid . . . the child with an astonishing capacity
for pleasure . . . with an unwilled relish of sensuous experience which
often unsettles the adults who like to call it affection.' This child,
'who can be deranged by hope and anticipation - by an ice-cream' and 'who
seems to have a passionate love of life' is very real indeed. But this
child has not been mislaid by psychoanalysis for the simple reason that
Freud never expounded such a vision of childhood in the first
place.

Read as the
autobiographical meditation of a father who has become enchanted by his
own young daughter and is almost embarrassed by the delight that she
occasions, The Beast in the
Nursery is touching, and, for fleeting moments at least, beautiful.
Read, as it is intended to be, as a serious commentary on psychoanalysis,
it is an extraordinary feat of intellectual self-deception.

One of the questions
which arises from the book concerns the fate of the beast which is
announced in its title. Where is the beast? Is it ever referred to in the
book at all? Since Adam Phillips writes prose some of which is elegant but
much of which yields up its meaning only with difficulty and frequently
not at all, any reasonably conscientious reviewer is likely to have read
each of his paragraphs at least three times before finishing the book. Yet
at no point was I able to find any mention of a beast. Determined to track
down the beast to its lair I submitted the title-essay to yet another
reading, scanning the pages anxiously for the word. At one point I thought
I had found it. But on closer inspection it proved to be only a breast. No
beast was within sight. Not even the shadow of a beast was
visible.

The theory of infantile sexuality has
often been an embarrassment to psychoanalysis. This is not because it is
untrue, which is merely an incidental inconvenience, but because it
associates young children with bestial sexual desires. That one of the
foremost contemporary apologists for psychoanalysis appears finally to
have succeeded in banishing the beast from the nursery altogether will not
endear him to his more traditional colleagues. But it will appeal to those
who like their psychoanalysis tame. That Adam Phillips should have managed
to do all this in a book whose title implicitly lays claim to an authentic
wildness is a remarkable achievement indeed.